Ted Williams…No, The OTHER Ted Williams

So, I’m 58 years old, white, live in Bellevue, sell wine for a living, and have eight grandkids. So, how is it that I’m sitting here at 8:49 on a Wednesday morning, tears streaming down my cheeks so flippin’ hard that I can barely type, watching a google news clip of a black man in Ohio who has been homeless for a couple of decades and is finally catching a break?

I guess it’s the same thing as seeing Susan Boyle for the first time: someone to whom Life has dealt a bad hand and, against all odds and their own sad history, is summarily yanked out of obscurity and personal tragedy by virtue of an undeniable talent that they always had but were just never given a chance to display.

Ted Williams was a young man from Brooklyn who, like lots of kids my age, grew up listening to and dreaming about radio; about the people whose voices poured out all over us, narrated our dreams, and illuminated events to which we were not witness. In my case, it was Larry Lujack and Dick Biondi in Chicago, two guys whose sheer presence led me to work at my college AM station, after a move to Maryland, and then to an 18-year “career” in radio stations from DC to South Carolina. For Ted, it was the amazing motherlode of NYC radio personalities. From Mel Allen and Red Barber in baseball to Murray the K in rock ‘n’ roll, the young Ted had no end of great voices to stir his imagination. After high school, Ted went to broadcast school to hone what by then was termed “a major league set of pipes”.

But, as the years went by, Ted’s passion became frustrated and he began to drift. It’s an old story and it usually ends the way Ted did: drugs, alcohol, bankruptcy, and a long, bewildering nose-dive from which it seems impossible to pull out. As his heart drifted, so did his body. All these years, decades, later, Ted Williams and his truly great voice wound up in Columbus, OH, standing on a street corner with a sign that laid out his plight:

“I have a God-given gift of voice. I’m an ex radio announcer who has fallen on hard times. Please! Any help will be gratefully appreciated. Thank You and God Bless You.”

Doral Chenoweth, a Columbus Dispatch videographer searching for story material, remembered the man with the odd sign whom he had passed several times while out working. He drove out to Ted’s corner, camera running, did the now-famous interview that over 5,000,000 people have clicked onto at youtube, and immediately thrust Ted Williams into an intense and illuminating spotlight. The Voice is – take it from me, a radio announcer who was definitely not born with any sort of “pipes” – nothing short of miraculous; a rich, vibrant, musical baritone that seems magically devoid of any detectable regionalisms, ethnicity, or imprecision. In a nutshell, this homeless guy, a man who probably became virtually invisible to the Columbus motoring public, has a huge and amazingly-marketable talent, as profound and undeniable in its own way as Susan Boyle’s. But his entree back into a job, a home, and a life is even easier and more immediate than Susan Boyle’s. The market for middle-aged Scottish pop stars is a fairly small niche. Thousands of American businesses need voice talent…and, in just the five days since the story broke, Ted has now had firm job offers from the Cleveland Cavaliers, ESPN, several radio stations, and may quite possibly be the next voice of NFL Films, whose producer, Kevin McLoughlin, said, “Somehow, some way, I need to get a demo with him [Williams].”

This is one of those magical stories that resonates with anyone who ever had a dream and blew it, ever screwed up badly and lost the job of a lifetime, or even those of us who did nothing but dream that dream and never even tried to chase it down. I spent 18 years in radio, gradually surrendering my fantasy of being the next Lujack or Biondi in the face of the undeniable fact that I simply didn’t have it. I stayed in radio by transitioning into audio production, copywriting, and character voice work, while not-so-secretly pining for a set of those sonorous, golden vocal cords that would keep me behind a mic for the next forty years. Here was a guy who absolutely, irrefutably Had It but fumbled the ball so badly that he wound up not only on the sidelines but completely out of the stadium. I never trod the path that Ted Williams did; the gradual, then faster and more inevitable slide into poverty and crime and despair but I can feel his pain acutely. You know, down deep, that you’re made for doing this one special thing and…you have no access to it anymore. Can’t get anyone to listen, can’t even afford to make an audition tape and job-hunt in conventional ways. You’re powerless, invisible, impotent, and what really stings is that nobody cares. Nobody.

The happy accident of Doral Chenoweth and Ted Williams intersecting at the Hudson Street on-ramp and I-71 in Columbus, Ohio, was even more of a lightning bolt than Susan Boyle’s startling appearance on a British TV show. Getting on the show at all insured that people would see her and hear her Voice. With Ted, it was sheer luck…that and a slow news day for Doral Chenoweth. “You’ll never believe how close it came for that segment never to get onto the Dispatch website,” Chenoweth joked, “I was thinking of story ideas and suddenly thought, ‘Oh, yeah…that homeless guy.”

The cleaned-up Ted on CBS Morning

Here’s the thing that has me soaking wet and almost non-functional: all those of us who think beyond the next meal realize that we could wind up like Ted. For me, several times, it has been frighteningly close. And we all want desperately to believe that, if this unthinkable fate fell upon our heads, we’d have a chance, a hope, a whisper, a prayer of somehow pulling back out and up. I am as happy for Ted Williams today as I have been, except on a couple of occasions, for myself. It pleases me no end to see a man who has been almost magically granted a second chance and is beaten and wise enough to appreciate the enormity of what’s happened. Try to watch his interview with CBS News’ Morning, in which he talks about getting to fly to New York to see his 90-year-old mother for the first time in ten years, and not fall apart weeping. If you can do that, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

By now, you’ve probably seen or heard something about this and nothing I’ve written here is news. But I visited the P-I site this morning and saw nary a word about it. It stuns me that I’m writing about it first here but it’s also an honor. For all of us P-I.com readers – whom I like to think of as Seattle’s best, brightest, and hippest – this is a story that has to be seen and appreciated. You don’t even need my links. Just go to google and type in Ted Williams. Then read a story that truly needs no embellishment, no Hollywood “treatment”, no spin to be utterly and soulfully compelling.

God Bless You, Ted Williams. I wish you a long, healthy, and productive life. Make the most of it, Brother.